Leiber & Stoller's 'Smokey Joe's Cafe' musical opens in Pasadena

In anticipation of the Pasadena Playhouse’s new production of the hit jukebox musical “Smokey Joe’s Café: The Songs of Leiber & Stoller,” featuring about three dozen early rock and R&B hit songs written by the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, I contacted Stoller to chat a bit about the phenomenal success he and his longtime writing partner had in the 1950s and 1960s.

The bulk of that conversation will be the subject of a feature story coming soon in Calendar, but as a prelude to the show previews that begin Tuesday evening, Sept. 17, I couldn’t resist asking Stoller a longstanding question I’d had about the song “Kansas City,” one of their earliest hits.

The original version was recorded in 1952 by Little Willie Littlefield, the Texas R&B singer and pianist who just died in July at age 81. In 1959, singer Wilbert Harrison recorded his version, and it’s that one that reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for two weeks in 1959. Several more years down the line, the Beatles recorded it and brought it to an even broader audience.

In Littlefield’s version, which was retitled “K.C. Loving,” the singer announces that “I'm going to Kansas City/Kansas City here I come….they got a crazy way of lovin’ there/And I’m gonna get me some.”

When Harrison recorded it, that second line was changed to “They got some crazy little women there/And I’m going to get me one.”

So, I asked Stoller, what happened — which way did they write it, and why did the lyric change?

“The way we wrote our version, it was ‘they got a crazy way of lovin’ there, and I’m gonna get me some," he said on behalf of lyricist Leiber, who died in 2011. "Maybe they felt that was a little too risque when Wilbert Harrison did it. That was seven years after the original, and to the best of my knowledge, that was the first cover after Little Willie Littlefield’s version.

"Unfortunately," he said, "the owner of the record company, who also had the original publishing company of that song, decided to change the name of it after it was recorded. He called it ‘K.C. Loving’ — he got it in his head that that was really hip. Wilbert Harrison did it under the original title, slowed it down, and that’s the version that spawned so many others — over 300 records.”

And which lyric does the composer prefer?

The racy original, not surprisingly — not so much for the meaning, but because “the original is a perfect rhyme with the lines ‘here I come’ and ‘I’m gonna get me some.’ The other is a relative rhyme” linking “some” and “one.”

In the era of “Work Bitch” and music videos featuring nude gymnastics on heavy construction equipment, the fact that Leiber and Stoller’s lyrics were the subject of such intense scrutiny more than a half-century ago seems positively quaint.